A lot of people invest in a nice, large screen TV for entertainment at home —the largest screen in the house. But let's face it, many times, these TVs, especially the budget ones, fulfil the visual part but fall short on the audio. Sonos' Arc Ultra, along with the Sub 4, aims to take care of your home entertainment audio. Priced at Rs 99,990 and Rs 84,990, respectively, let's explore what these two can deliver together:
First, the Arc Ultra's design, this pill-shaped soundbar measures nearly 47 inches in breadth and weighs 5.9kg. It features a matte finish on most of the body with capacitive touch keys for playback controls and pairing at the top with the HDMI-in, LAN port, Bluetooth switch and power in located at the back.
The Sub 4, on the other hand, weighs under 12kg and is this big rectangular block with a woofer cavity in the middle. There's an LED at the front like the Arc Ultra, but also a pairing button, plus the LAN port and power in at the bottom. You can mount the Arc Ultra, but the wall mount has to be bought separately.
The TruePlay room setting detection lets the speaker scan the surroundings and room dimensions for what it considers better audio output according to the acoustics. You can use the system wirelessly over Bluetooth and Apple AirPlay or wired with an HDMI cable (bundled with the Arc Ultra). These support Bluetooth 5.3 with only AAC and SBC codec support.
Wired is where the combination truly shines and how it is mainly meant to be used. With the Arc Ultra and Sub 4 working together, you get really clear vocals on pretty much whatever is thrown at it—rock, metal, pop, hip hop. You can also enable Speech Enhancement from Settings for more emphasis on dialogue delivery when watching movies and TV shows. This in itself is one reason the Sonos combo can improve your TV experience considerably.
You get good treble as well as mids with the soundbar shining with a lot of depth and loudness without distortions at higher volume levels. It can fill a 15x15 room, provided you've placed both the Arc Ultra and Sub 4 well enough.
You can do an advanced calibration using the iOS app to try different positions. With added Dolby Atmos, you can expect to get a nice surround sound effect when watching something in Atmos.
The Arc Ultra is equipped with 14 drivers, including 2 upward firing ones—a 5.1.2 channel system. Adding the Sub 4 and an Era speaker, the entire set up transforms to a 9.1.4 channel system.
Oddly, there's no DTS:X present here, so some Blu-ray disc playback DTS would not be lossless. Having said that, the more I use these, the more I like how well they handle different genres or movies, series, TV content, and even live sports, while you're at it.
Both the soundbar and subwoofer can be paired together with the Sonos app or by the buttons. The app isn't too great to use and might be the loose end of the entire experience. The Sub 4 has dual woofers facing inward plus dual amplifiers.
While the Arc Ultra and Sub 4 together aren't budget purchases by any means, they do take your audio experience at home to a different level if you don't have anything set up with your TV for audio so far. You get really good and filling sound for various needs—music playback, movies, TV shows, live sports or just something mellow playing in the background. Safe to say, the combination of Sonos Arc Ultra and Sub 4 for your home entertainment does not disappoint.
